Between April showers and March thunderstorms, you'll find us in the fields picking sciopetin.
Foraged plants and funghi play an important part in Italy's food culture as a celebration of each season. Spring seems to come earlier and earlier each year in Italy and as soon as it does, we're scouring the fields for tiny sciopetin shoots.
Seeing as the tradition of picking from the land gets handed down through families, ancient dialect names tend to stick through the years. Where we live, the plant Silene Vulgaris is called sciopetin from the dialect word sciopar - meaning to burst because of the bell-shaped seed pops that pop open in summer from this particular wild flower. Around Venice, the same herb is called carletti, that's what Francesco's granny calls it and that's what you'll find in the local springtime vegetable markets if you don't have time to spend picking or fields to pick in.
Only the top shoots and lower leaves are used when cooking with sciopetin and there are many different dishes you can these in. Frittata is wonderfully quick and delicious, as is a pesto you can make the traditional way with pine nuts, olive oil and Parmigiano or Grana Padano. Risotto is Francesco's speciality so that's what we always make first!
Think of sciopetin or carletti as a delicate spinach flavour, you need quite a bit to make a 4 person risotto - about 300g of curati leaves. I love the word curare to describe the job of getting food ready to be cooked.
You can curare funghi but gently brushing off the soil and trimming any unwanted bits, you can curare fish by removing the innards and descaling the skin and you curare strawberries by washing them and removing the leaves. Curare is translated as 'to cure' in English, but also means 'to take care of'.
I think it beautifully describes the love and appreciation of good food we've taken time to harvest, maybe grown ourselves or found at the market. Usually it's the elderly nonne who's job it is to curare. They have time, patience and a chair placed outside in the sunshine.
Read up on our blog post on how to make good risotto, there's an established Italian trick called La Mantecatura which takes a little time but makes all the difference!
If you know your foraged plants well, feel free to use whatever you have in your fields, forests and garden. Wild garlic is delicious, as are nettles and anything safely forageable. It goes without saying to only harvest what you know!
Find the recipe for Risotto coi Sciopettin in our new cookbook Appetito ❤️
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